REPRISE

One of the other major subjects Darrell Kipp and I pondered the other day was Blackfoot music and Bruno Nettl, who first came here to study it in the 1960’s. He had a fabulous set of reel-to-reel recordings of Blackfoot songs taken back in the times of the first anthropologists: George Bird Grinnell recorded 40 songs in 1897, McClintock collected 51 songs in 1898, Clark Wissler collected 200 songs in 1903-4, and so on. Because of this, Nettl could compare early versions of a specific song with later versions -- which showed that they didn’t change much.

In fact, there is usually a strong pattern which is “the way” an Indian song is sung. The drummers sit around the big bass drum, then they softly and steadily beat the rim, then they get more intense, then the leader sings the theme, a second leader repeats, and by that time the group is singing in unison, but not necessarily in time to the drum! Nettl suggests a 2:3 relationship. There is set of repetitions and drumming may stop during some phrases of singing. Part of the reason I like “Pow-wow Songs for Kids” by the Blacklodge Singers, is that the words are English so a person can follow the repetitions more easily.

Nettl said that when he did this study, no one much was using flute or anything stringed. But it struck me that when I subbed at the Nitzipuwahsin Real-Speak School, the kids were learning guitar. No one said, “Now there will be guitar class.” Instead the teacher showed up and some kids had already been practising softly in preparation. Clearly they loved it. They clustered in a corner with high concentration.

Funerals here are always accompanied by country music on guitars. When Bob Scriver was teaching music, he started everyone in the low grades on little plastic flutes and he said they just took to it naturally. There’s not a problem with European music. (I’m writing a story about an Indian man who plays concertoes on a grand piano and am a bit surprised that people find this unlikely. I’ve been a Browning Indian home that contained a grand piano.)

Back to the point: Bruno Nettl thought one day, “We do all this research on the reservation -- why don’t we give something back to them!” This is the point of enlightenment that so many of the researchers who visit here never reach. They seem to feel that Indians are like little lab mice -- they would never think of turning the results of their studies over to the mice.

And, of course, lots of people do give things back and those precious documents or artifacts are lost, neglected, sold, or stashed without even examination. But that’s what Piegan Institute is able to prevent. They looked at this big box of reel-to-reel tapes and thought, “We’ve got to find a machine that will play this stuff.” (Of course, the tapes themselves were re-recorded from wax cylinders.) It took a while to find an old reel-to-reel machine, but as soon as they did they sat down to listen. Then, as they began to accumulate people with some technical expertise, the tapes were put on DVD’s. Darrell began to play them in the background while he worked, occasionally recognizing words, which he couldn’t have done before the Immersion Program started.

But still, they were interesting, but what did they mean? In the end, one needs a particular kind of person, who turned out to be Shirlee Crowshoe who speaks Blackfoot as her first language. These days she is listening to the DVD’s on the computer and transcribing what the people say among themselves in their own language while Bruno was there asking for songs and then asking “funny questions” about the songs.

In the 1960’s Bruno had a pretty good idea what the men were saying but probably was a little less clear what the kibitzing women were telling the men. Sometimes they’re joking so much that Shirlee gets to laughing. Mostly there were two concerns: one was to protect the Sacredness of the songs by leaving off a phrase, maybe at the end, so it wouldn’t have to be accompanied by the proper ceremony it belonged to. (This is much like filming a Catholic mass -- the priest will leave his hat off to prevent himself from being in “sacred” mode.) The other concern was to come up with as many songs as possible because they were being paid by the song. They really needed the money. These were old people living in log cabins on Moccasin Flats where the broken windows might be mended by a rag stuffed into the hole in the glass and heat came from a wood stove.

They had no idea that in the twenty-first century the technology and the motivation would be there for these recordings to be studied -- not by high-powered professors from back East, but by their own people with some sophistication and sympathy for both worlds. This work cuts against the bitter post-colonial doctrine that depends upon rejection of all white modes and records. Grinnell, McClintock and Wissler did their best to capture the sounds, never knowing there would be a Bruno Nettl, but in faith that it was important. Likewise, Nettl recorded and then returned the songs never knowing that Darrell Kipp and Shirlee Crowshoe would welcome them like returned children. The first recorders could never do this empowering work of today, but today’s workers could never do this without those old recordings. It’s a synergy.